What is Microsoft Office 365?

Office 365 is a portfolio of Microsoft’s productivity tools and services in the cloud. Office 365 can include Exchange Online for email and calendaring; Office applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint; plus many other applications and collaborative services such as SharePoint Online and Skype for Business.

Office 365 is a complex technical solution for which ensuring security, performance and availability are top concerns, reports Gartner. Many enterprises choose to pass the complexity of designing, implementing and managing Office 365 properly to a trusted managed service provider. Organizations choose TierPoint for Managed Office 365 services to realize eight key benefits and more.

What are the benefits of the Office 365 suite?

First, a quick look at the benefits and costs of Office 365, and then we’ll look more closely at the benefits of Office 365 managed services. A Forrester study commissioned by Microsoft, The Total Economic Impact of Office 365 Enterprise E5 Solutions, identifies three key benefits of Office 365:

• Weekly time saved due to improved collaboration and information sharing and more efficient meetings: 203 minutes per user
• Reduction in costs associated with other collaboration software and hardware solutions: $6.5M
• Number of hours saved per user per year from reduced downtime: 15.75 hours

Forrester calculates these costs of Office 365 experienced by organizations:

• Internal planning, implementation, and ongoing support: $2.65 million.
• Deployment and managed services total: $4+ million over three years
• IT and end-user training costs: $647,670
• Licenses for 5,000 workers: $4.90 million over three years
• Incremental network bandwidth: $216,805

The big benefits of Managed Office 365

Those first three costs indicate that a lot of IT time will be required to plan, implement, deploy, and support Office 365, which is why the following benefits of Managed Office 365 can provide a substantial return for many enterprises.

1. Do Office 365 right from the start

A big investment calls for doing it right the first time. Office 365 is not one size fits-all, and Managed Office 365 helps you fully understand your choices. With Managed Office 365 you can reduce risk with upfront discovery and design to determine the best deployment model for Office 365, specific to your enterprise. For example, your end users would have a vastly different experience depending on whether or not you used federated identity management and authentication. We’ll describe various deployment scenarios, explaining what each would be like for your end users, so you can make an informed decision and avoid surprises.

2. Determine when and how to implement a hybrid architecture

You may not want to go all cloud all the time, if you need to balance differing requirements across an organization. For example, you may want to integrate Office 365 with on-premise Microsoft Exchange infrastructure for greater flexibility. Or you may not want to move all your end-user data to the Microsoft cloud; you may want to keep some user data on premises. Your Managed Office 365 advisor can design a custom hybrid environment for your business.

3. Maximize security and compliance

Last year, the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) found that many organizations have their overall security posture lowered by third-party contractors engaged to implement Office 365 for them. On the contrary, a benefit of our Managed Office 365 advisors is that we will help you to enhance the security of Office 365.

Your Office applications hold some of the most important data in your company. We can layer on Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) from the start to protect mobile experiences – and enforce identity and access management and data protection on any device. After deployment, we can keep your Office 365 security components up-to-date daily, taking care of upgrades and maintenance promptly.

4. Minimize licensing spend

Do you already have Microsoft Office licenses? We’ll work with you to design an Office 365 deployment that makes the best use of your existing licenses on servers, devices, desktops, and in the cloud.

5. Get expert help with a complex deployment

While your IT team may not have deployed Office 365 before, TierPoint’s Managed Office 365 advisors do it every week. With TierPoint as an extension of your team, your IT staff can be as involved or as uninvolved as they want. We’ve got you covered from complex discovery and design to integration with existing infrastructure, and on through routine email and user administration.

6. Make updates and maintenance easy

You have limited internal IT resources. Managed Office 365 frees up your IT admin resources to do what they do best – run your business. You can pass the complexity of managing Office 365 to a dedicated team that focuses on Office 365 every day. Our Office 365 managed services team can ease your burden of daily maintenance and support. We have a large and capable service delivery staff of our own, and we subscribe to Premier Support from Microsoft, so we can escalate and resolve your Office 365 problems swiftly.

7. Maximize Office 365 scalability

When you need Office 365 for more users, you can easily add licenses through the TierPoint Portal to meet the growing needs of your business.

8. Provide end-users with the help desk they need to be productive

How many help desk calls do you get when you upgrade a piece of software like Microsoft Office? We optionally offer end-user help desk services for our Managed Office 365 customers who want to ensure end-users get the support they need, while IT focuses on more strategic initiatives.

We’ll handle basic end-user questions such as password resets, login issues, and Outlook connection problems, so you don’t have to. Your end users get access to our experienced Office 365 support team with advice for setup and configuration, and support for all Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more), Exchange, SharePoint, Yammer, and Teams.

TierPoint is an approved Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider

TierPoint’s consultative approach allows us to take into account your unique requirements. Regardless of the device(s) your company uses, TierPoint supports your organization’s need to access Office 365 anytime and anywhere. Pass the complexity of Office 365 to a dedicated team focused on you:

• Our team of more than 300 managed services professionals is here to support you.
• We provide full migration, deployment, admin and end-user support, and management services.
• We’ve got you covered for simple or complex migrations. We migrate and deploy customers every day and keep up-to-date with all the latest from Microsoft.
• We specialize in hybrid environments that help clients improve response times, drive performance, and manage risk.

Learn more about Managed Office 365 and talk to our experts to see how we can work together for the benefit of your organization.

Do a quick search for ‘digital transformation’, and no doubt you’ll come up with articles talking about everything from IT security, to cloud computing, to AI. All of these topics should be part of a comprehensive digital transformation strategy, but so should document management.

In these days of 24×7, instant-access, and global collaboration, document management will likely become one of the top priorities on your digital transformation to-do list. Document management is no longer just about accessibility and collaboration. Many of the documents we share include sensitive information that we don’t want in the wrong hands. Sometimes, as in the case of industries like healthcare, we’re even required by law to protect that information.

The lifecycle of a document

In our latest infographic, we follow the life of a typical document that many companies create as a matter of routine – a report on the results of a customer satisfaction survey. At each step, our document encounters threats that risk exposure for the business. Luckily, Microsoft EMS (Enterprise Mobility + Security) is there to save the day!

Learn more about Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS)

If you’d like to learn more about Office 365 and EMS, reach out to us. We can help your organization transition quickly and help you ensure everything is set up to enable maximum performance and security.

Too many spend their day running from one fire to another. The goal is to put them out as quickly as possible, or at least contain them so they don’t turn into a metaphorical conflagration that consumes the business. This leaves the IT team with little time to eat lunch, let alone think about how they can contribute more strategically to the organization.

Of course, it’s not likely we’ll ever see the day when fire-fighting in IT is a thing of the past. Human beings and IT are a naturally combustible combination. What if you could give your IT professionals better tools with which to fight these fires?

The right productivity tools to address challenges

Having the right productivity tools and applications give you the ability to address risks and streamline daily tasks, freeing up time for more strategic projects.

In a recent eBook, we follow a day in the life of Lewis, a one-man IT dynamo with whom many IT professionals will identify. His organization has just merged with another, and he’s got his hands full helping his new colleagues get set up in the new system. He has the right tools for the job.

Here are a few of the challenges he must address on a day to day basis:

1. An unauthorized device has just tried to access the document management system from Chicago. Did the firm’s partner just try to use another new tablet from the road? Or is it a hacker trying to gain access?
2. Someone tries to send a confidential file over email. Wait, are they even allowed to access that specific file?
3. One of the firm’s junior staff has their phone stolen while at the gym. The confidential information it contains is worth far more than the phone itself; plus, hackers could use it to gain access to the back-office systems.
4. Two coworkers discuss wiring money to one of the execs who needs it right away. It sounds “phishy” – could they be a target of some type of cyberattack?

In each of these scenarios, plus several more, Lewis successfully leverages Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) to address the situation.

What is Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS)? Office 365 is Microsoft’s subscription service that includes their suite of productivity applications in the cloud. Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) is access management, information protection, threat protection, unified endpoint management, and a cloud security broker, all built right into Office 365.

Download and read our eBook:  An I.T. Hero’s Day.

Learn how your business can benefit from Office 365 and EMS

Of course, in our world, Lewis gets the accolades he deserves from the managing partner at his firm. Your individual results may vary, but at the very least, Office 365 and EMS can help you get more done and leave work at the end of the day knowing everything is under control.

If you’d like to learn more about Office 365 and EMS, reach out to us. We can help your organization transition quickly and help you ensure everything is set up to ensure maximum performance and security.

In this post, I am not going to address the types of emails you need to retain, nor the length of time you need to store them. You should work with qualified legal counsel to determine the requirements for your business. What I am going to address is how Microsoft Exchange Online can help you safely, securely and cost-effectively comply with whatever records retention guidelines you establish.

What is Exchange Online?

Exchange Online is the hosted messaging application found in Office 365. For businesses both large and small, Exchange Online is a more cost-effective solution because it eliminates the need to maintain Exchange Server in-house or invest in the hardware needed to run the application. For organizations that are moving from on-premises messaging applications, it also offers increased reliability. Microsoft’s financially backed uptime guarantee of 99.9% is better than any guarantee you’ll get from almost any other provider, let alone the kind of uptime you’ll typically find for an on-premises implementation of Exchange Server.

Records Retention is Not Easy

In the old days, companies generally complied with records retention rules through email backups and journaling. There are a few obvious challenges with backups: they don’t always get done, backup media has a higher propensity to fail the older it gets, and worst of all, storing all of those emails can get costly.

Journaling is often confused with email backups, but it’s a slightly different animal. An email journal contains all of the same information as the backup plus additional information such as the physical location of the sender and receivers and the unique identifier of the systems involved. Journaling is required in the event an organization ever needs to prove something for a legal challenge.

As anyone who’s managed journaling before knows, it can be tedious and time-consuming. If you’re managing the journaling destination, the emails pile up quickly. Mid-sized and enterprise organizations may need a dedicated administrator for journal management because they will constantly be creating new mailboxes and redirecting journaling to the new locations. A great deal of processor capacity and storage space must be dedicated for the filing, archiving, and indexing of the journaling mailboxes.

How Microsoft Exchange Online Can Help You Comply with Records Retention Rules

Litigation Holds are the latest evolution, or alternative, to journaling and email backups. While email journaling and backups send a copy of an email to another location, Exchange Server offers a category of Litigation Hold called an In-Place Hold that keeps a copy of the email in a specified location. A user can still delete the email or content as they’d expect, but In-Place Holds will indefinitely retain the email in a hidden location only administrators can access.

Litigation Holds also let you refine your retention policies according to your specific requirements with a feature called Query-Based Holds. For example, you can place holds on emails that match criteria you set such as keywords, time parameters, and sender/recipient. You can also specify the length of time for which you want to retain these records.

Managing Litigation and In-Place Holds is pretty easy to do. While you want to ensure you are managing these parameters under the direction of legal counsel, you don’t necessarily need to use an IT resource. Microsoft often talks about assigning the task to a paralegal, for example.

Finally, in the event of a legal challenge, eDiscovery allows you to search your electronically stored information across documents, presentations, audio and video files, SharePoint sites and emails including those in Litigation Hold.

The Benefits Add Up

As I’ve described how you can use Litigation Holds and In-Place Holds in Exchange Online, you’ve no doubt made note of several important benefits. Let me summarize a few that should stand out:

• No change in user behavior required – Getting users to follow prescribed processes has always been one of the toughest challenges in compliance. Litigation and In-Place Holds don’t require any behavioral or process changes.
• Less chance of human error/intervention – Users can’t permanently delete emails covered under the holds, nor can they access emails in the hidden location without an administrator’s assistance.
• More control over what is stored – Legal counsel will probably recommend you only store what is absolutely required. Query-Based Holds give you that control.
• Improved legal response – In the event of a legal challenge, counsel will probably recommend you submit only what is needed, but to do it as quickly as possible to avoid additional, more intrusive requests. eDiscovery makes the process much simpler and faster.

Cloud computing. Simplified.

TierPoint offers managed cloud services across public cloud platforms like Azure, private hosted clouds, and hybrid environments. For organizations migrating to Office 365, we offer services like initial environment assessments, performance recommendations, managed Office 365, migration and deployment services and more. Contact us today to learn about how we can help you get started on your path to digital transformation.

For many businesses, migrating to applications in the cloud is an important step in the digital transformation journey. Today, we’ll take a closer look at SharePoint Online and its benefits to businesses looking to migrate to cloud applications.

What is SharePoint Online?

Microsoft’s SharePoint Online Planning Guide describes SharePoint Online as:

A cloud-based service that helps organizations share and collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers. With SharePoint Online, you can access internal sites, documents, and other information from anywhere—at the office, at home, or from a mobile device.

The key word in that very simple description is “collaborate.” Today’s businesses are spread far and wide. Here are 10 ways SharePoint is superior to email and file sharing. 

1. Low Maintenance 

If you’re only using SharePoint Online for document management, there’s little to no maintenance required. Even group permissions can be delegated to teams – a feature many SharePoint users seem to love. However, if you’re only using SharePoint Online to store and share files, you’re really missing out. SharePoint Online has a lot of capabilities that can be configured to meet complex business goals. Having an experienced admin on staff can help you get the most from SharePoint Online and accelerate your journey toward digital transformation.

2. Low Cost ­

If you’re already using Office 365 for your business, SharePoint Online is included in many subscriptions, and using it wouldn’t cost you anything. If not, SharePoint Online is still available for a monthly, user-based fee. SharePoint Online is designed to work best with the Office 365 suite of applications, so if you aren’t using Office 365, maybe now is the time to take a closer look.

3. Security 

If someone tried to gain physical access to your data center, could you prevent it? If they ran a dictionary attack against an admin account, would they be stopped? If they purchased a hack that took advantage of the latest vulnerability, would you have it patched before they got in? If you can answer yes, congratulations! You are probably worth a lot more than you’re being paid. (Or you are underestimating today’s cyber criminals.

Because it is a platform-as-a-service, SharePoint Online is always up-to-date with the latest security features. In fact, Microsoft has a team of resources dedicated to identifying the latest threats and hardening the SharePoint platform. The SharePoint Online sites you set up and the data they contain can be protected even further with multi-factor authentication. Depending on your Office 365 subscription, it may already be included.

TierPoint Cloud-Only Customers: If you currently do not have multi-factor authentication set up, let’s talk. It’s included in your package. Click here for more information.

4. Compliance

SharePoint Online has advanced features that can be configured for a long list of regulations and industry standards. This certainly makes it far more suitable for high-risk environments than simple email file sharing and more suitable than many of the file-sharing applications as well. But the most important thing to remember is that no application or platform is ever compliant out of the box. We can configure the features in your entire Office 365 suite, including SharePoint Online, to help you meet whichever regulatory or industry standards apply to your business.

5. Search and Discovery

SharePoint Online’s search capabilities promote collaboration by allowing users to search everything on their SharePoint site. But really, that simple statement doesn’t do the search feature justice.

However, there are two aspects I want to specifically point out here: First, admins can make search even more powerful with metadata. Second, SharePoint Online’s search capabilities were developed with a security-first mindset. Search results are even trimmed so that users only see results for content they are permitted to access.

6. Remote Workforce

SharePoint Online can be accessed from anywhere, without the headaches and added costs of maintaining a VPN. Users can sync their data to their local computers and work on those documents offline. For example, a manager can review and sign off on the latest sales orders while offline. Once they are online again, their approval will be automatically synced to SharePoint Online.

Also read: 8 Benefits of Office 365 with a Managed Provider

7. Simultaneous Editing 

In many file sharing applications, two people can’t open the same document at the same time. When they try to get around this limitation, by using email, for instance, simultaneous editing causes even bigger headaches as the team struggles to reconcile different versions of the document. SharePoint Online cures those headaches with a feature called co-authoring which allows multiple people to edit the same document at the same time.

8. Customer Engagement Through External Sharing

OK, so you’ve set up SharePoint Online to ensure security and compliance. Now, what happens when one of your employees needs to share a document externally? Does all that effort go to waste?

Not with SharePoint Online. That’s because SharePoint online allows you to share files externally from within SharePoint. Your users simply share a link to the document to those with whom they need to collaborate. External collaborators can then create an account (using the specified email address and link) to gain access to the documents shared. And external access can be revoked or set to timeout after a preset timeframe.

9. Web Portals

SharePoint Online is a collaboration platform, not just an application. You can use SharePoint Online to set up multiple web portals for your users. You might have one for expense reporting, another for the key accounts sales team, one for early adopters of a specific product, and so on. Since these portals are SharePoint sites, all of the security features I’ve mentioned apply to the content on your portals as well.

10. Workflows and Automation

Finally, SharePoint Online has workflow and automation capabilities built-in. We can build workflows that pass documents around for signatures, team input, or whatever else you may need. Here’s an example of how you can use portals, workflows, and automation together. A law firm can set up unique areas for each of their customers. Paralegals put all documents for that client in the client’s section. SharePoint automatically holds those documents until the lawyer approves them. Then the documents are shared with the client via a client portal.

SharePoint Online is one of the most powerful and innovative products in the Office 365 suite. If you’re a current Office 365 customer, you may already have access. Visit the SharePoint Online Training Site to learn more about the features, and then try them out yourself by building a test site.

Cloud computing. Simplified.

TierPoint offers managed cloud services across public cloud platforms like Azure, private hosted clouds, and hybrid environments. For organizations migrating to Office 365, we offer services like initial environment assessments, performance recommendations, Office 365 consulting services, migration and deployment services, and more. Contact us today to learn about how we can help you get started on your path to digital transformation.

In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted the benefits of the Microsoft Office 365 Software + Services delivery model over the SaaS model. In Part 2, we took a deeper look at the business case for Office 365. Now, it’s time to take a look at some of the challenges of migrating to Office 365 and how you can mitigate these issues to protect your ROI.

Deciding what to migrate first with Office 365

This is the toughest focus for many organizations. Do you start with the biggest challenges, e.g., moving to Exchange Online from Exchange Server? Or, do you migrate simpler applications such as the core productivity tools first to get everyone accustomed to using an online solution? Or, maybe the right thing to do is to address document management issues using SharePoint Online.

The challenge isn’t so much about what to do first, as it is about setting realistic expectations about the amount and pace of change that will be required. When these expectations aren’t set properly, implementations can stall. The organization ends up with a hybrid solution, but only because the project ran out of steam, not because it was the planned configuration. This can undermine the ROI of an Office 365 implementation because it requires duplicative infrastructure you wouldn’t otherwise need.

Creating the right hybrid for Exchange Server

There are many valid business reasons for taking a hybrid approach. The most common is compliance and security. That’s not to say that a cloud-based solution can’t be compliant or secure. In fact, in some cases, it is easier (and often less expensive) to comply with standards in the cloud than in an on-premises implementation. However, every situation is different, and you’ll need to consider compliance and security when determining the best configuration for your organization.

For many businesses, this configuration is a hybrid solution that splits an application such as email across the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. This often requires additional expertise to set up properly. For example, in the case of email, you will need to use both Exchange Server and Exchange Server Online, setting them up so that they replicate seamlessly without impacting the user experience.  If this is your IT department’s first foray into a cloud environment, you may want to reach out for 3rd party expertise as it is one of the more challenging hybrid scenarios.

Setting realistic migration expectations

If you have a lot of data, it will take time to migrate, and availability requirements must play a role in your migration planning.  This is another area where including someone, either internal or 3rd party, with prior migration experience can help. They can help you assess the amount of data that will need to be migrated and create a realistic migration schedule. And, of course, once you have a migration plan in place, you will need to set expectations with users so there are no unpleasant surprises.

Establishing security measures for cloud apps like Office 365

The myth of the cloud being less secure than an on-premises implementation has been pretty well debunked. Cloud applications like Office 365 have numerous built-in security measures, and the data centers housing these applications are staffed 24X7 by top-notch security experts. For more details on security, visit Microsoft’s Office 365 Trust Center.

However, there are new precautions that you might want to take with a cloud deployment that you did not have to think about before. As we mentioned in Part 1 of this series, some of the Office 365 plans are great for companies with mobile users. But with all those devices out in the field, you may want to establish additional security precautions that monitor who is logging in using what device and from where. Mobile devices can be easily lost or stolen, and an unusual behavior pattern may be the first sign of an attempted breach.

Setting up Office 365 policies for industry regulations, compliance

These days, almost every mid sized organization has some sort of industry regulation, compliance standard, or data management protocol they are required to follow. Most do not preclude an organization from using the cloud, but you need to set up Office 365 correctly. It’s not hard, but the little things, like setting up email retention parameters for users, can become confusing And, remember the human factor, too. It’s a good idea to publish policies for online data storage and access for users as well to ensure that everyone understands the proper protocols.

These are just a few of the more common challenges we see when organizations migrate to Office 365. If you’d like to discuss your particular situation, we always welcome the opportunity to learn more about your business.

Cloud computing. Simplified

TierPoint offers managed cloud services across public cloud platforms like Azure, private hosted clouds, and hybrid environments. For organizations migrating to Office 365, we offer a number of services including:

• Initial environment assessment and performance recommendations
• Consulting services for ensuring Office 365 is customized for your unique requirements, including compliance and security
• Migration and deployment services
• Architecting hybrid environments
• Synchronizing Office 365 with on-premises Exchange
• Configuration and monitoring
• Automatic upgrades and maintenance
• Real-time troubleshooting

3 Reasons to Move to Office 365

Organizations move to the cloud to help them reach any number of objectives, but here are three practical and immediate benefits for moving to the cloud:

#1 Mobility – While the final numbers are not in yet, Gartner predicted laptop sales to surpass PC sales in 2015. That doesn’t even count all the tablets and smartphones used by today’s information and blue-collar workers alike. Mobility isn’t just an ‘option’ for most organizations, but a necessity. Office 365 can be deployed on a PC or Mac, and most plans include apps for tablets and smartphones. Plus, as we discussed in Part 1 of this series, because the application is installed directly on-device, users can keep working even when they aren’t connected to the Internet.

#2 Scalability – As with SaaS applications, it’s fairly easy to scale up and scale down, meaning you buy the seats you need when you need them. When you no longer need them, you simply turn them off. In this regard, both SaaS and Software + Services provide a tremendous financial advantage over perpetuity licensing, especially for larger organizations.

#3 CapEx to OpEx – Even though the application is deployed on-device, Office 365 is offered as a subscription service. This allows many businesses to move the expense from CapEx to OpEx budgets and often makes it more financially feasible than a large capital outlay.

Those are strong benefits for most of our clients, but business leaders, especially the CFOs we work with, are usually looking for long-term benefits and a more specific ROI analysis.

It’s Payback Time

Microsoft commissioned Forrester to do a Total Economic Impact Study on O365 for enterprise-level customers. Here’s what they found:

The study includes the details behind these numbers. For example:

• The move from the 2010 version of the Microsoft solutions to the Office 365 cloud-based solution meant that new infrastructure did not need to be purchased, installed, and maintained.
• Server licenses for various Microsoft solutions were no longer needed.
• Using Office 365 eliminated the need to undertake four [Control and Compliance] projects that would have otherwise been required.

In our final post in this “ROI of Office 365” series, we’ll discuss how to protect your ROI by avoiding some of the challenges often associated with implementing Office 365.

 What Exactly is Office 365?

To determine where Office 365 fits into your IT strategy, it’s vital to first understand what exactly it is — and what it is not. Since most readers are at least familiar with Microsoft Office, we probably don’t need to start by defining the components of Office. However, there are various configurations of Office 365 that give you some ability to select the components your business needs. Click here to see the current plans.

When discussing ROI, it’s important to understand that Office 365 is not just Microsoft Office accessed through your browser. In describing their offering, Microsoft makes a helpful distinction between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Software + Services.

Software-as-a-Service – With SaaS, the application (and often the data as well) resides in the cloud on an infrastructure that is completely managed by a third party. Business applications deployed via SaaS that you may be familiar with include Salesforce.com and Concur.

Software + Services – This model combines the cloud with a traditional on-device implementation. That is, the software is delivered via the Internet, but then it resides on your device: PC, Mac, tablet, smartphone, etc. Related services such as updates are then delivered over the Internet. Your data can reside in the cloud or on-device.

Microsoft is a little more detailed when they speak about the differences, but these two descriptions hit on a vital differentiator: where the applications reside. So, why is this such an important factor?

Availability is one of the reasons so many organizations resist moving their business applications to the cloud. Organizations like Microsoft do a pretty good job on their end of guaranteeing uptime. (Microsoft currently offers a financially backed 99.9% uptime guarantee.) But what about those times when your Internet connection goes down or your employees are working remotely and don’t have access to a connection? When the application resides on your device, you don’t need a connection to keep working. The Software + Services model offers a tremendous advantage over SaaS, especially for organizations that have a lot of remote employees.

That said, there are ways to use SaaS applications like Google for Work in offline mode. The challenge for administrators (and users) is that this needs to be configured before you are without your Internet connection. In many ways, this exemplifies the approach these two leading organizations take to the cloud. Google demonstrates an “all cloud all the time” attitude, whereas Microsoft is pushing hard on a “cloud first” approach, but recognizes that a hybrid of cloud and on-premises at some level is more workable for most organizations.

In our next post, we’ll dive into the ROI of Office 365 and examine the business case for moving from on-premises Office or another productivity suite to Office 365.